Linguistic Axiology of Values in Kazakhstan’s Media Discourse: an Analysis of Keywords as Representations of Social Concepts

The focus of this article is the Kazakhstani media discourse, which plays a significant role in transmitting and shaping value orientations. The study examines keywords as verbal representations of fundamental values in Kazakhstan’s mass media. The empirical basis of the research consists of a corpus of texts from the online versions of national, commercial, and regional newspapers. The research methodology combines corpus-based methods for identifying statistically significant lexical units with subsequent critical discourse analysis and qualitative semantic interpretation of their contexts. As a result of corpus analysis, a set of keywords was identified and selected, structuring the axiological space of the most salient thematic groups: «human capital», «self-realization», «national and cultural identity», «social justice», and «family». The core of this set includes such key lexemes as education, science, artificial intelligence, self-realization, success, labor, tradition, language, jus-tice, inclusivity, and family values. Contextual analysis revealed their value-related connotations and discursive functions. It was found that the keywords education and science function within a pragmatic semantic field actualized by predicates of utility and strategic relevance. The thematic field of self-realization constructs a narrative of achievement, where success is defined through the relationship between labor, effort, and professionalism. The keywords tradition, identity, and language not only carry a strong positive evaluation but also frequently appear within code-mixing strategies, serving as linguistic markers of cultural hybridity. The identified keywords and the nature of their linguistic representation demonstrate that Kazakhstani media act as an active agent of axiological transformation, performing a discursive synthesis of traditional value systems with global trends. The revealed capacity of digital media to mediate between traditional values and emerging social orientations is of particular importance for understanding the dynamics of value transformations in Kazakhstani society.